Agency Warns About Decline in Access to Education

LONDON — Social mobility through education is waning around the world, despite increased access to education, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned in a report this month.

The 560-page annual publication, Education at a Glance, urged governments to do more to ensure that everyone has the same opportunity for a good education early in life. It warned that many young people are attaining lower qualifications than their parents, even in the richest countries of the industrial world.

Among people from 25 to 35 years old, 16 percent now have lower qualifications than their parents, compared with 9 percent among those 55 to 64 years old, it said, based on data from the 34 member countries of the O.E.C.D., which advises governments on economic and social policy, as well as Argentina, Brazil, China, Colombia, India, Indonesia, Latvia, Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Africa.

More access to education has not translated into a more inclusive society, Ángel Gurría, the secretary general of the agency, based in Paris, said in a foreword to the report.

“The benefits of the expansion in education were shared by the middle class, but did not trickle down to less-advantaged families. In relative terms, the children of low-educated families became increasingly excluded from the potential benefits that the expansion in education provided to most of the population,” he said.

Andreas Schleicher, the organization’s director for education and skills, says education can lift people out of poverty but for that to happen “we need to break the link between social background and educational opportunity.”

“The biggest threat to inclusive growth is the risk that social mobility could grind to a halt,” he told a media briefing. Increasing access to education for everyone and improving people’s skills “will be essential to long-term prosperity and a more cohesive society.”

The gap between the “haves” and “have-nots” is growing, Mr. Schleicher warned. Adults with similar levels of education can also have very different levels of proficiency in employable skills, he noted.

“Not all further education qualifications really deserve that name,” he said, “because often those individuals are not actually better skilled than people just coming out of schools.”

A high school graduate in Japan may have better skills than a university graduate in Italy or Spain, and those differences have an impact on employment opportunities, he added.

“You ask yourself why are there so many unemployed graduates in Spain and Italy. Something is wrong. When you actually look at the skills you see it aligns perfectly: These graduates are not particularly highly skilled compared with the top levels of skills in countries such as Japan, Finland and the Netherlands,” Mr. Schleicher said. “The qualifications are not matched by skills you would expect.”

Education “generally fared well” during the economic crisis, the report found. On average, O.E.C.D. member countries increased spending on education by around 6 percent between 2008 and 2011. Among the countries surveyed, only six cut their spending. One of those was the United States, which cut by 3 percent. Others were Russia, which cut by 5 percent; Estonia, by 10 percent; Hungary, by 12 percent; and Iceland and Italy, both by 11 percent.

Finding new ways to finance education has become a hot topic in countries grappling with post-recession budget constraints. Perhaps surprisingly, Mr. Schleicher pointed to Britain, which controversially increased tuition at English universities and expanded student debt programs to offset public spending cuts, as one of few European countries to have figured out a sustainable approach.

“If you look in Europe, to France, to Italy, Germany, Spain — those countries really have a lot of headaches at the moment,” he says. “They no longer have the public money to put into higher education, and they have not introduced any kind of means-tested grants or loans.”

Still, he said, Britain and the United States both had a long way to go to improve equal access to education.

In particular, higher education in the United States had become “prohibitively expensive,” with the country slipping from its top ranking among the agency’s member states in terms of access to college degrees. “They were number one in 1995. Now, they are an average performer,” Mr. Schleicher said.